We're All Excitable Now!
Reservoir Moose: Tarantino has never achieved a scene this saturated with the tense rising threat of imminent violence ... 7:44 P.M.
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Blame Orszag First! Let's Go to the Numbers:
Isn't
Question 32 in the NBC/ WSJ
poll
pretty close to a verdict on the success or failure of Orszagism as a means of selling health care reform? The verdict would be failure:
32: Thinking about efforts to reform the health care system, which would concern you more?
Not doing enough to make the health care system better than it is now by lowering costs and covering the uninsured.
OR
Going too far and make the health care system worse than it is now in terms of quality of care and choice.
The second option wins, 53-40. Doesn't this at least suggest that all the talk about "game changers" and curve-benders, about how "we're going to have to change how doctors think about health care and how patients think about health care" and the need for a "very difficult, democratic conversation" about costly end of life care (requiring "guidance" from an "independent group" outside of "normal political channels") has spooked people, in a way that just saying "we're setting up these health care exchanges and here's how we pay for them," or "we're going to let anyone over 50 buy into Medicare" wouldn't have spooked them? ...
P.S.--Ask Not for Whom the Chooch Tolls: The GM bailout (Question 28) is shockingly unpopular :--65 vs 30. ...
P.P.S.--"I was upset": Barney Frank had more in common with Andrew Sullivan than I realized. He's calmed down now. ... 4:47 P.M.
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Keeping Up With the Whippersnappers:
It's a Mini-festival of bitter excuses over at
Ezra Klein's Twitter feed
:
So refusing to shake voters hands turns out to be a bad campaign strategy? Same with insulting the beloved local sports franchise? Huh.
Meanwhile, travel back in time with us to ... five days ago , when authoritative juiceboxer Matt Yglesias chastised Scott Brown for having managed "to squander a very favorable electoral landscape." According to Yglesias, Brown "finds himself running in a winnable race, and yet he’s overwhelmingly likely to lose ." .... 10:37 P.M.
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Missing in Massachusetts: A good day to remember the late Dean Barnett . ... [ via MKH ] P.S.: This past year I would gladly have traded the entire national staffs of the New York Times, Washington Post and all four TV networks for any two of Barnett, Deborah Orin, Marjorie Williams and Cathy Seipp. They were all immune to Democratic BS. ... 10:31 P.M.
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I still haven't heard a convincing argument against the Sudden Victory strategy (in which the House passes the Senate health care bill, fixes it later). Sure, attention-hounds like Anthony Weiner (who's done
quite enough to damage
the cause of health care reform, thank you) will denounce it today.** Give them a couple of weeks for the Kabuki makeup to wear off.
(Or a couple of months-- alert reader S.S.
wonders if there is is there a time limit on how long the House can let the Senate bill sit there before they take it up?) . ... P.S.:
On Hardball
just now ,
Lawrence O'Donnell said he's never seen a case of 'pass it now, we'll enact a fix later' work. But President Clinton endorsed (and signed) the 1996 welfare reform while pledging to correct its excesses (notably its harsh treatment of legal
immigrants). There were rumors of a memorably cynical left-wing bumper sticker along the lines of "Only Clinton Can Undo What He Has Done." But in fact Clinton was
largely successful in going back and fixing the problems he identified, if I remember. ...
**--Don't we have to add Anthony Weiner's name to the list of those awaiting Ezra Klein's denunciation for being "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people"? 10:25 P.M.
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